Linda E. Katz, Ph.D.

I founded this Center in 1982 with the purpose of providing the finest therapy available in the  San Francisco Bay Area — therapy that combines effectiveness with caring, that comes from the heart of the therapist and reaches the heart of the client, creating true healing. Our mission has been to have a core staff who provide this quality of therapy and who train other therapists to do therapy from this framework.  For more than  three decades we have succeeded in this mission. As the premier therapist training site in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have trained therapists from all over the world, as well as graduate and post-graduate students. And as one of the leading counseling centers, we have served thousands of people from the local community, as well as those who travel to us from other parts of the country and those we serve internationally via Zoom.

Chosen by the John Bradshaw Center in 1990 to become one of its nine outpatient counseling affiliates in the U.S., we became leaders in the treatment of codependency and addiction. For over 25 years, we have offered the unique and profoundly healing 20-week Group Intensive Program: Healing Your Past, Transforming Your Future. Based on John Bradshaw’s concepts, this group focuses on healing core shame and inner child wounds in order to discover, heal, and reclaim our true inner self. Addressing the attachment wounds that created the loss of our real self and the hiding of our inner child, this 20-week Intensive provides the opportunity to transform your life.

At our Center, all of our therapy work — whether in individual, couples, family, or group therapy — focuses on helping you to discover and express your real self, your own inner voice. Each of our therapists is committed to bringing all of their skills and presence to assisting you in this process. To this end, they remain immersed in their own personal growth and recovery work. As Co-Director, my primary roles with the staff are to provide supervision and ongoing training, consultation regarding their clinical work, and support for their personal and professional growth.

In addition, I co-develop, along with my Co-Director and our clinical team, new programs and services related both to the community we serve and those we train. For example, our Center’s years-long work in the fields of addiction and family therapy has led us to provide specific Intervention work for those in relationship with an addict — ending the cycle of enabling — and supporting the addict to begin a process of recovery.

My own personal journey has led me to focus on issues related to adoption, addiction, and homelessness, especially for vets. As a mother whose child came through the path of adoption, I have learned first-hand the power of what is called the “adoption wound” or “primal wound.” Inner child work, long my focus, teaches us of the need to repair our bridge to our own inner self — a bridge cut off by abusive, alcoholic, or dysfunctional families. Parenting our child, who was adopted at and loved from birth, taught me about the need to repair the bridge to the inner self when that bridge has been cut off by abandonment.

The search for love–the need to attach–is an essential part of being human. We seek it through relationship, through our families, and through our work in the world. When this search is driven by the need to fill an empty hole, nothing from the outside can fill the hole. Every addiction — whether to substances like drugs and alcohol or to relationships, sex, spending, or food — is an attempt to fill an unfillable hole. Is an attempt to mood-alter from the pain of emptiness. Is an attempt to fill the emptiness.

That is why all addictions are essentially a search for reconnection with the real self, the inner self who was abandoned, abused, neglected, or not seen. And that is why the healing of all addiction is a spiritual journey — a journey to find that which will never leave us.

It is my privilege to assist those who either struggle with some form of addiction or who are or have been in relationship with an addict, including having had parents or other family members in addiction. It is my privilege to participate in Interventions to help break the cycle, and it is my privilege to refer people to 12-step programs for recovery from addiction. It is also my privilege to share my experience, strength, and hope about the healing and release from suffering available through working the Al-Anon program.  

A Demonstrated Record of Professional Excellence

Trained by the John Bradshaw Center in state-of-the-art counseling methods pioneered and popularized by John Bradshaw.

Ongoing training in today’s most effective and innovative therapy methods including Gestalt, Psychodrama, Sandtray Therapy, Contextual Therapy, Group Therapy for Adult Children of Alcoholics, and others.

TV and Radio Show Guest, and Recognized Expert:

• Appeared as mental health expert on Bay Area television and radio shows.
• Recognized expert in treating grief and dealing with suicide.

Leader in training psychotherapists since 1980.

Extensive Master’s and Post-Master’s training in Child and Family Development.

California-licensed therapist since 1982.

Doctorate Degree in Clinical Psychology, The Union Institute, 1990.

Clinical Member, California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists.